Know Your Value

Who Determines Your Worth?

Chicken backs are a food that many people don’t talk much about anymore. Out of all the cuts of a chicken, the backs are probably a top contender for the less desirable cuts of chicken. It may be because chicken backs are roughly 90% skin and bones. You are not going to find very much meat on a chicken back.

However, there was a time when chicken backs were very popular, especially in the Southern states of America. The poorer lower-class segment of the population found cooking chicken backs was an economical and practical way to use up the whole chicken. Chicken backs were often used to make soups, stews, and broths, as the marrow from the bones and meat provide a rich flavor and nutritional properties. They also were flour coated and deep fried, baked with rice, or boiled.

Today in some parts of the world, chicken backs are considered a delicacy and are highly prized for their tender meat and flavorful broth. And in other parts of the world, they are still considered a less desirable cut of meat and are sold at a lower price.

How can this be? How can a chicken cut, in this case a chicken back, be a highly prized delicacy and a less desirable cut at the same time? Cultural traditions, economic factors, and culinary preferences most likely play an influential role in how one determines the value of not only the chicken back but all things in life.

That is why it is essential for us to know our own value and significance. It is foolish and scary to allow others to determine our self-worth. We live in an age where many judge their own lives by what they see on social media, in magazines, and in movies. We compare everything from the number of followers, to the number of likes, to the number of post shares.

You can easily get caught up in the façade of other people. Striving to attain what someone else has or appears to have is a quick recipe for destruction. Exodus 20:17 warns us not to covet anything that someone else has. To covet means to inordinately desire something or someone that belongs to another person. Coveting is not just admiring your neighbor’s new car. Coveting is much deeper. It comes from inward feelings of jealousy and drives you to do anything and everything to get a new car just like your neighbor’s car for yourself at any cost.

An easy way to avoid the sin of coveting is to know your own value. You have got to have a thorough understanding of who you are. By knowing who you are and fully operating in your own gifts and talents, it leaves no room for coveting, jealousy, or low self-esteem. God in all His awesomeness created each of us unique and special. Psalm 139:14 You are the Lord’s work, and His work is wonderful. You are wonderful. You are created in His image and after His likeness so how valuable you must be?

Don’t allow social media, your parents, your friends, your job, your spouse, or even yourself to discount your value. Just as with the chicken backs, society will either consider you a highly prized delicacy or it will deem you a less desirable cut of meat. Either way should not affect the ingrained confidence of the Holy Spirit in you. He will remind you of your value.

As you enter this week, walk with renewed confidence in knowing you are valuable. So valuable that Jesus willfully sacrificed His life for you. He became a curse and the laughingstock of His day for you. That is how valuable Jesus thinks you are. Amen!

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